The streets were clogged with people now, hundreds of government workers, lawyers, jurors, marshals, judges, transients, parking lot attendants, and LA Times reporters. They milled around, trying to stay clear of the burning buses, the smoking cars, the fallen buildings, the wailing of the injured, the stink of the dead.
Buck pushed and shoved his way through them, clearing a path for himself and Marty up 1st Street as it rose over Bunker Hill. Marty realized there might be some advantages to having Buck along after all.
Marty had only traveled a mile or two since leaving the set, but it was a hard walk, making his way over ruined streets strewn with chunks of disgorged asphalt. Already his feet felt swollen, his knees were sore, and he was gasping for breath. If he kept deteriorating like this, Marty thought, he might need Buck to give him CPR in a couple more miles. He resolved at that moment to go back to the gym and use that membership, if the gym was still standing, or if it wasn’t, just jog around the rubble three or four times each day.
As he ascended Bunker Hill, Marty clearly remembered the last two times he’d been downtown. The first was five years ago, when he and Beth came down to get a wedding license and meet with the family court judge who was going to marry them. The judge seemed to embody the full force of the law, as if personally schooled by John Houseman in the art of glowering intimidation. But when he performed their wedding, he seemed to be channeling Henny Youngman instead, apparently using their vows as a chance to try out a possible Vegas lounge act.
The second time was about a year ago, to talk his way out of serving on jury duty. All it took was an autographed photo of Jennifer Garner and a promise to read the clerk’s spec screenplay when he finished it. Marty still hadn’t gotten it and, judging by the damage to the County Courthouse, stomped under one of Mother Nature’s enormous Doc Martens, he probably never would.
“Hey, did you piss yourself?” Buck glanced at Marty’s pants.
“That’s Evian,” Marty replied between labored breaths.
“Yeah,” Buck snorted. “I bet you shit Beluga caviar, too.”
Abraham Lincoln’s bronzed, decapitated head rolled past Marty as he paused at the corner of Hill and 1st and looked at the glimmering, downtown office towers a few blocks south. Buck was more interested in watching Honest Abe’s head roll through the intersection than appreciating the view.
The only way you could really see the polished granite and tinted glass monoliths was from a distance, up close they were about as welcoming and creative as a retaining wall. They were each designed to make a grand architectural statement that could be absorbed in one glance from the freeway. Now they were all shedding glass like tears.
From where Marty stood on the crest of Bunker Hill, catching his breath, he could even see the future, or at least the building that stood in for it in a thousand bad TV shows and movies. The Bonaventure Hotel was five giant glass cylinders waiting to blast off a concrete launch pad into outer space. Today it looked like the launch finally happened, only the rockets had exploded before lift-off.
The studios would have to find the future somewhere else.
“Now that’s what I call fucking ironic,” Buck snorted. Following the course of Abe’s wayward, bronzed noggin, Buck inadvertently spotted something interesting.
“What?” Marty asked.
“Look at that,” Buck pointed a block south, where the old, brick Kawada Hotel still stood at the corner of 2nd and Hill, the sign for their Epicenter Cafe intact. “Isn’t that fucking ironic?”
“Uh-huh,” Marty continued on up the street, wondering for maybe the eighth time in five minutes why Buck wouldn’t go away. But he told himself it couldn’t hurt to have a big guy with a big gun at his side, especially considering the bad neighborhoods he’d soon be walking through.
“I appreciate ironic, witty stuff like that,” Buck said. “Kind of goes against my hard-ass personality. Makes me so goddamn colorful you want to fuck me, doesn’t it?”
Marty heard cries from the Department of Water and Power, a boxy building erected on a parking structure, the top level of which had been turned into a square lake, creating a moat around the edifice. The forty-year-old architectural conceit had turned into a trap now that the parking structure had pancaked onto itself and the contemporary drawbridge connecting the building to the street had fallen. The DWP workers were stranded in a collapsing building, but could rationalize their fate as the price of working in a bureaucratic fairy tale.
“I once saved a puppy dog,” Buck added. “They were gonna kill the drooling little fur ball for protecting his home against an intruder. I couldn’t live with the fucking injustice, with the idea of this poor, fluffy creature dying for doing the right thing, so I took a goddamn moral stand. The night before they were gonna give him the needle, I broke him out of the pound and let him live in my Mercury Montego.”
Buck looked to Marty for congratulations and got incredulity instead.
“What kind of puppy?” Marty asked.
“What fucking difference does it make?”
“Was it a pit bull?”
“It was a pit bull puppy,” Buck snapped. “They are just as fucking adorable as any other fucking puppy.”
“And this intruder, what exactly was he doing?”
“Climbing over the fence into the dog’s territory, that’s what, after disturbing the animal’s peace in a terrifying manner.”
“He terrified a vicious pit bull,” Marty said.
“The kid’s baseball slammed into the dog house, scaring the crap out of the dog, then the idiot kid climbed into the yard to get his ball. Okay? The point is, the dog doesn’t know a fucking baseball from fucking gorilla and did what came naturally, defending himself and his goddamn master. So what I did was a fucking humanitarian act.”
“He was your dog, wasn’t he?” Marty asked. “And he mauled a child.”
“You are missing the fucking point, asshole.” Buck stabbed the air between them with his fat finger. “I got depth of character and thousands of great stories.”
Marty was finally getting it. “You’re pitching me a series, right? About you?”
“Why the hell not? You ever see a guy like me on TV?”
Only on Jerry Springer. “Call my secretary and make an appointment.”
“We’re having our appointment right now, dumbfuck,” Buck said. “You got some other pressing engagement?”
The world had literally fallen down around them and Marty was expected to take a pitch. But he couldn’t say this was the worst circumstances under which he’d been forced to listen to TV series ideas. His male fertility specialist was examining Marty’s scrotum, feeling around his uneven balls, when he offered the observation: “Some incredible characters walk through these doors. You wouldn’t believe the hilarious stories.”
“Really?” Marty said, trying to act as if it was perfectly natural to be standing there, his pants around his ankles, a guy rolling his testicles in his hands, discussing series concepts.
“I got them all on index cards, they are absolute gold, funnier than ‘Seinfeld.’ You want to see them?”
Marty was afraid to say no, considering the guy literally had him by the balls. The situation wasn’t all that much different today, but Marty’s attitude certainly was. A year ago, his wife was sitting in the waiting room, and he could feel her yearning desperation through the walls. He needed the doctor happy. He needed his lopsided balls producing guided-missile sperm.
He didn’t need Buck.
“Look around you,” Marty told Buck. “We just survived the big one. Thousands of people are dead. The city is in ruins. Do you really think this is the best time to pitch a TV series to me?”
“Absolutely. We’re bonding. When this is all over, we’ll have a foundation to do some business together,” Buck replied. “What’s your name?”
“Martin Slack.”
“All the detectives on TV are pussies, Marty. Do-gooders who only care about helping people and don’t give a shit about getting paid. Everybody cares about getting paid, so that’s bullshit. How the fuck they make the payments on their sports cars and buy all those expensive suits if they don’t get paid? Tell me that.”
Marty was about to tell him about the last detective show he worked on, just this morning in fact, when he came down the other side of Bunker Hill, saw the Harbor Freeway, and forgot everything he was going to say. Hundreds of cars were tangled together, charred and aflame, strewn over six lanes of up-ended roadway and fallen overpasses, stretching on for miles. If there was anybody screaming or crying under it all, the forlorn wail of agonized automobiles drowned them out.
